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ADDRESSES 



EY THE 



Hon. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW, LL.D., 



ON THE OCCASION OF THE 



Selekation of the Birthday of Abrahan? Lincoln 

AT 

Burlington, Vermont, Feb. 12th, 1895, 



6on«ncement Exercises of the University of Ghicago, 

April 1st, 1895, 



AND AT 

His Birthday Dir^er, 

TENDERED HIM BY THE 

MONTAUK CLUB OR BROOKLYN, 
April 20tri, 1895 



Gift 
Author 
(Perm 



s • 



j ! 2 



COMPLIMENTS OF 
CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 



ADDRESS 

OF 

Hon. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW, LL. D., 

ON THE OCCASION OF THE CELEBRATION OF THE 

Birthday of Abraham Lincoln, 

AT 

BURLINGTON, VERMONT, 
FEBRUARY 12th, 1895. 



Ladies and Gentlemen : 

The pleasure of appearing before you this after- 
noon is great, but marred by circumstances. I had 
supposed the occasion was to be the usual recrea- 
tion for a busy man of the after-dinner speech which 
pleasantly occupies the mind without tiring it. To 
have it transformed into an afternoon address or 
oration means a preparation, or the use of the Hor- 
atian method of the file and thumb-nail, and my 
conditions made that impossible. You will pardon 
the absence of formality and accept the earnest- 
ness with which I approach a subject so grand in it- 
self as the hero whose memory -we celebrate, and 
principles so enduring and vivifying as those of 
the party of which he is the greatest ornament. 

The tendency in all times has been for the people 
to grow so far apart from their National heroes 



that the hero becomes impossible. We cannot 
live with perfection ; we cannot have the cam- 
araderie of personal communion with saints. The 
force and effect of continuing leadership is to be in 
touch with the leader. We have idealized already 
the worthies of the revolutionary period, and 
especially Washington, so that they are out of the 
pale of humanity. To us they never possessed the 
foibles and weaknesses which are common to our 
race. I doubt if Washington ever did. I had oc- 
casion at the time of the Centennial to study closely 
his character and career. It was impossible to 
lower him to any plane where a horizontal view 
could be had of him. In the camp and in the cab- 
inet, in the Continental Convention and around the 
campfire, in the midst of his soldiers, or at the mess 
with his staff, he was always the same dignified, 
majestic and unapproachable figure. For the times 
in which he lived, for the mission to which he was 
destined, these lofty characteristics were appropri- 
ate. The revolution knew little of the fierce dem- 
ocracy. The classes and the masses were distinctly 
defined and separated. The pride of birth, of an- 
cestry and landed proprietorship was never 
more distinctly asserted and never more 
generally recognized. It is probable that for the 
purpose of bringing the wealth and the intelligence 
of the country to the support of the patriot cause 
it was necessary that one of this class who was infi- 
nitely superior to his fellows, and whose aim and 
ambition were only his country and its liberties, 



should lead the movement. The processes of evo- 
lution of democracy for one hundred years had 
created a condition where Washington would have 
been a failure in the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, 
his opposite in every respect, t because he was so 
different, was the most successful leader of any re- 
volution of modern or ancient times. 

As we study the characteristics which made Lin- 
coln great and successful, we find them not in the 
usual gifts of great statesmen. Others have been 
more cultured, others have had more genius, 
others have had more experience and training, but 
none of any time had as the motive power of every 
action an indomitable and resistless moral force. 
You may call it the principle of natural religion, 
or whatever you may. It was an instinct for the 
right, a comprehension of justice, a boundless 
sympathy and compassion, an intense and yearn : 
ing love for his fellows and their welfare which 
knew neither rank nor race, but gathered within 
its boundless charity all mankind. The force and 
effect of this power in Lincoln can be best illus- 
trated by the contrast between him and his great 
antagonist, Douglas. Douglas was born in Ver- 
mont ; about him were all the influences of this 
liberty-loving and intelligent commonwealth ; his 
father was a clergyman, a college graduate, a man 
of brains and culture, and his mother a worthy 
helpmeet for her minister husband. Every author- 
ity of environment and atmosphere was for right, 
justice and liberty. His struggles with poverty 



were not those which enervate or degrade, but 
those which inspire men of fiber, energy, ambition 
and genius to the efforts which make a career. His 
natural abilities, trained in the best of schools, 
made him a teacher, a lawyer, a judge, a legislator, 
a senator and the leader of his party. It made 
him the ablest of debaters in the United States 
Senate, the most formidable of foes upon the 
platform in a political campaign, and the most 
adroit of politicians in framing issues which 
should capture or mislead the people. In 
any condition of the country's affairs, when 
great moral questions were not at issue, 
Stephen A. Douglas would have been President. 
Lincoln, on the other hand, was born in a slave 
State, the son of a poor white, and lived during his 
early youth in a cabin of one room, under condi- 
tions of abject poverty and ignorance. His mother 
died, his shiftless father moved to Indiana, a log 
cabin was erected which had neither partitions nor 
floors and scarcely windows or doors, a few acres 
were cleared to get the bare necessaries of life, 
and almost at the period of manhood Lincoln had 
no education, was dressed in skins, was associated 
with semi-savages who relieved the hard conditions 
of their lives by brutal debauches and equally 
brutal fights among themselves, and yet he remained 
uncontaminated by the drinking, swearing, idle 
loafers, roughs or thugs who constituted his com- 
panionship. His energies would be shown occa- 
sionally with his enormous strength in protecting 



the weak or rescuing the defeated, and a promise 
of his future powers given by holding spellbound 
at times his rough auditors by his rustic eloquence, 
or entertaining them at night with his endless f and 
of anecdote, drollery and mimicry. An insatiable 
craving for knowledge led him to learn to read and 
to write. The only books within miles about him 
were Robinson Crusoe, a short history of the United 
States, Weem'sLifeof Washington, and Banyan's 
Pilgrim's Progress. These he soon knewb}^ heart. 
This master of the English tongue, this most felici- 
tous of phrase makers, this most eloquent of 
speakers, framed his sentences and formed his 
style by writing compositions with charcoal upon 
a wooden shovel or the shingles from the mill. A 
clerk in a store on starvation wages, a storekeeper 
without capital, and his business sold out by the 
sheriff, a surveyor earning ten or fifteen dollars a 
month, and a lawyer with no other equipment than 
Blackstone and the statutes of Illinois — such was 
Lincoln at a period when the accomplished and 
cultured Douglas was already the idol of his State. 
And yet thus, on the threshold of a career, with 
such surroundings, such teachings and such im- 
pressions, in the midst of a community which 
drank, Lincoln was a temperance man ; in the 
midst of a community that swore, Lincoln was 
free from blasphemy ; in the midst of a com- 
munity not highly moral, Lincoln w 7 as as 
pure as an angel ; in the midst of a com- 
munity which regarded the negro as no better 



6 

than the horse or the mule, Lincoln was an abol- 
itionist. 

Sailing down the Mississippi River upon a flat 
boat, with a crew composed of his rough comrades, 
who boasted they were half horse and half alli- 
gator, who anchored at night for roystering riots 
in the villages and continued them when they 
reached New Orleans, Lincoln was apart from 
them, while of them. He wandered one day into 
the slave market and saw a young girl put up at 
auction. He witnessed the brutal examination of 
her by the buyers and spectators, the coarse jokes 
that were exchanged in the crowd and the cynical 
beastliness of the auctioneer, and the slumbering 
tire of moral and religious wrath planted in him by 
his mother, or inherited from some saintly ances- 
tor, broke out with the declaration, "If I live, the 
day will come when I will hit slavery a blow from 
which it shall perish." That slave girl on the 
block aroused the moral forces within him which 
kept him from the temptations of his environ- 
ment and made him the hero and the martyr of 
liberty. 

The peoples in all ages have loved gladiatorial 
combats, whether of the mind or muscle. The 
keen delight of the Greek in the contests of his 
orators, and of the Roman in the bloody fights of 
his gladiators, illustrated the principle. The de- 
bate between Douglas, the leader of his party, the 
inventor of the phrase, "popular sovereignty," 
which was to stand both for the principle and the 



policy which would save his party from being over- 
whelmed by the rising spirit of liberty inthecoun- 
trj 7- , and the possible President of the United 
States, and a man who, though unknown, excited 
interest because the Republican party in his State 
deemed him worthy to be placed against the 
champion, was a picture which made Illinois the 
battle ground of freedom. If Lincoln had pos- 
sessed less of this controlling moral principle — if 
he had been actuated by the same motives which 
governed Douglas— if his God had been his per- 
sonal ambition more than the welfare of the race, 
or the Presidency more than patriotism — he would 
have defeated Douglas. The repeal of the Mis- 
souri Compromise had thrown open the territories 
of the great northwest to slavery. Douglas had 
met the rising tide of indignation and stemmed it 
by a proposition which apparently left the people 
of the territory to decide whether their institutions 
should be free or slave. The decision of the Su- 
preme Court in the Dred Scott case had shown that 
this alleged principle was a flimsy pretext. Never- 
theless it was generally accepted. The South was 
committed to slavery and regarded its extension 
as necessary to the existence of the system. The 
business of the North was bound up in the preser- 
vation of slavery. The press and the pulpit were 
largely with their congregations, their constitu- 
encies and their readers. "Abolitionist" was a 
term of reproach and opprobrium. " Anti- 
slavery " was little better. To touch slavery was 



8 

to touch the Union, and to touch the Union was to 
imperil the Republic, and so slavery became the 
cornerstone of the Republic. The Declaration of 
Independence was an empty sound for Fourth of 
July declamations and assaults upon the mon- 
archial systems of other countries. Lincoln wrote 
his speech. He read it to the leaders of his party. 
It was based upon this thought, couched in these 
words, " A house divided against itself cannot 
stand. I believe this government cannot endure 
permanently half slave and half free. I do not 
expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect 
the house to fall, but I expect it will cease to be 
divided. It will become all one thing or all the 
other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest 
the further spread of it, and place it where the 
public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the 
course of ultimate extinction ; or its advocates 
will push it forward, till it shall become alike 
lawful in all the States — old as well as new, north 
as well as south." The leaders of the party with 
one voice said, "That speech defeats you and 
elects Douglas." u Ah ! " said Lincoln, " I know 
that, but I am looking beyond Douglas and be- 
yond the Senatorship. That sentiment appeals to 
the conscience of the north against the extension 
of slavery in the territories and against the system 
of slavery." It was the gauntlet of liberty 
thrown into the arena which began the battle that 
ended with the publication of the Proclamation 
of Emancipation. 



9 

There never was such a President — never such 
a ruler as Abraham Lincoln. He did not repre- 
sent hereditary privileges, for he came from the 
plainest of the plain people ; he did not repre- 
sent heredity, for he had none ; he did not 
represent the colleges or the universities, for 
he knew them not ; he did not represent capital 
and great accumulations, for he had neither ; but 
he did represent the toiler upon the farm, in the 
workshop, upon the highway, in the factory, any- 
where, everywhere where honest men and honest 
women were striving to better their conditions and 
to illustrate the dignity of labor and the nobility 
of American citizenship. Without this touch with 
the plain people his ability, his genius, would have 
made him distrusted, for it may be taken as almost 
an axiom that there is no career for great genius 
by popular vote. He knew the country, the lim- 
itations of his power, how far and how fast the 
administration could go in the great struggle, 
better than the cabinet, or Congress, or journalists, 
or advisers. "Call for troops to suppress the 
rebellion," shouted the northern press, the north- 
ern pulpit and the representatives in Congress. But 
he said, with the adoration that exists for the con- 
stitution and its strict interpretation, and for the 
Union, and with the dread there is of its dissolution, 
the flag must be assailed before a response can be 
had. Against the advice of every member of his 
cabinet he said, "Let us send provisions to the be- 
leaguered United States soldiers heroically defend- 



10 

ing the flag in Charleston Harbor." The unarmed 
provision ship was driven back, the flag fired upon, 
the fort was captured, the plain people who were 
his constituents understood then the situation, and 
millions of soldiers responded to his call. 

Mr. Greeley thundered in the Tribune, Mr. Sum- 
ner in the Senate, the clergymen in their pulpits, 
and the orators upon the platform, that he should 
destroy the confederacy at once by freeing the 
slaves. He knew as no other man did I he strength 
and power of the feeling which had grown up in 
the country of the sort of sacredness that hedged 
about property in slaves. But when defeat after 
defeat came, when there was despair of the result, 
when the future of the Republic looked dark, 
when the people had been educated to regard 
the Union as more sacred than slavery, then he 
promulgated his immortal proclamation. Other 
Presidents and other rulers have deemed their full 
duty performed in their annual communications 
to their congresses or their parliaments, but 
Lincoln every day was addressing letters by 
which he was counseling and arguing with 
the people upon the questions of the hour, the 
perils of the country and the duties and dangers 
that were before him. Now he writes to Mr. 
Greeley, now to the workiiigmen of Manchester. 
now to the workingmen of New York, now to a 
State Convention, now to a convocation of clergy- 
men ; but always to the people of the United 
States. Whenever his great brain and his great 



11 

heart welled up so that he seemed about to be 
suffocated by the difficulties of the situation, and 
by the impossibility of solving his problems, Lincoln 
poured his troubles out to the people of the United 
States, and asked for their sympathy, their advice 
and their support. The appeal was never made in 
vain. Politicians raved against him, and said that 
his utterances were unwise, and his actions indis- 
creet. Earnest men, who had the cause at heart, 
called conventions to prevent his renomination, 
and then to defeat him for re-election, but the 
plain people with whom he had been talking as 
with familiar friends, whose homes he had en- 
tered, at whose firesides he had sat, by whose bed- 
sides he had talked, in whose inmost circles and in 
the midst of whose family prayers he had been, re- 
sponded with an overwhelming support which 
gave him again the presidency, and the presidency 
by rjractically the unanimous voice of the people. 

Lincoln knew nothing of the dignity, so far as 
it is expressed in manner and dress, which belongs 
to high station. The instinctive sense of propriety 
and consciousness of superiority and greatness 
which hedged Washington was absent in him. In 
our time, in the fierce light of our publicity, with 
the scintillations of electricity rendering brilliant 
every nook and corner and cranny of a public 
man's existence and thought, the temptations to 
enlarge the wreath which the people place upon 
his head are almost irresistible. The test of 
greatness is the wearing of the halo. It destroyed 



12 

Napoleon, it ruined two-thirds of the generals in 
the war, it hasdriven great and little politicians, 
from the commencement of our Republic until 
now. into obscurity. But Lincoln was never 
troubled as to the size of his head. He never over- 
estimated nor underestimated who he was, what 
he was nor what he represented. He never for- 
got where he came from, and never lost sight 
of the fact that except by the accident of 
position he was neither better nor worse than 
those who placed him in the Presidential chair. 
He possessed what no other ruler ever did, or, if he 
did, no other ruler dared to use, the power of humor. 
The portentous solemnity of our public men per- 
vades our political atmosphere, even to depressing 
melancholy. The less the statesman knows the 
more solemn he is, the thicker his head the more 
owlish [his bearing. A President of the United 
States once said to me, " No man can ever succeed 
in this country who gives rein to his humor or his 
fun. The people no longer look upon him as a 
serious man, and only serious men are recognized in 
the consideration of public affairs." 

When Mr. Lincoln came to Washington he was 
unknown to the great leaders of the party. He had 
the courage, which only a very great man can have, 
of summoning them all into his Cabinet. The rule 
has been growing to summon only lesser men into 
the Cabinet. In modern times as soon as the Presi- 
dent has selected his constitutional advisers the 
wiiole detective agency of the newspapers is set to 



13 

work to find out who they are, where they come 
from and what they have done. The village attor- 
ney, the village scribe, the local philosopher bound 
upon the national platform with theories as broad 
as their environment, and as useful. The process 
has the merit of elevating the chief by the depre- 
ciation of his subordinates. Lincoln believed in 
more harmonious pictures. Napoleon, surrounded 
by the Marshals of France, every one of them a hero 
of a great battle, every one of them the demon- 
strated leader of a mighty army, himself the ac- 
knowledged chief and leader of them all, formed a 
picture that commanded the admiration of his time 
and has arrested the attention of posterity. This 
Illinois lawyer, orator and statesman, called to his 
aid the men who had demonstrated in the Senate, 
in the House and in the Courts that they were the 
leaders of men. What a spectacle ! This ungainly 
giant of the west, angular and awkward, uncouth 
of manner, inelegant of address, with the courtly 
Seward for Secretary of State, the stately Chase for 
Secretary of the Treasury, the worldly, dominant 
and shrewd Cameron for Secretary of War, and the 
imperious Stanton as his successor ! Chase turns 
to his friends and intimates that the country has a 
mountebank for President. Seward, ever anxious to 
be useful, writes a private note offering to perform 
all the duties of the Presidency and leave the orna- 
ments of its name and station to Lincoln. He re- 
ceives in reply a letter which ignores the insult but 
says in effect, " I will run the administration and 



14 

you run your department, except when I think that 
you had better run it in some other wa} r ." In less 
than a year everyone of those great leaders recog- 
nized that he was in the jDresence of his chief and 
superior. 

Lincoln under other conditions might have made 
a great playwright, or he might have been a great 
actor. He was unconciously dramatic. His dis- 
appearance at Harrisburg, on the way to Washing- 
ton for the first inauguration, his reappearance at 
the Capital when the thugs were waiting to assas- 
sinate him, was a dramatic surprise which excited 
the whole country. His arjpointment of Hooker 
to the command of the Army of the Potomac, in a 
letter which told him plainly his weaknesses and 
his failures and the reasons why he ought not to 
have the responsibility of the command placed 
upon him, was both a comedy and a tragedy. His 
offer to McClellan to borrow his army if he only 
knew what to do with it, as it was apparent 
McClellan did not know, was one of those strokes 
of genius in expression which removed the popular 
idol and broke it. . A messenger summoned the 
cabinet to the White House. The first to enter 
was the stately, the dignified, the always proper 
Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase. The 
President looked up from his book and said, " Mr. 
Chase, I was just reading a most interesting work, 
which I have enjo3^ed more than anything I have 
met with in a long time. Let me read you a part 
of it." And thereupon he began reading to him 



15 

Ar tenuis Ward's lecture on " Wax Figgers." The 
astonished and irritated Secretary of the Treasury, 
listening as the other members of the cabinet 
gathered, indignantly exclaimed, " Mr. President, 
we did not come here to hear this idiotic nonsense. 
For what are we summoned?" Mr. Lincoln put 
his hand in his drawer, pulled out a paper and 
said, "Gentlemen, I summoned you to submit this 
paper ; not to ask your advice as to whether I 
should issue it or not, because I intend to issue it 
no matter what your advice maybe ; but to ask sug- 
gestions as to its form." And he read to them the 
immortal Proclamation of Emancipation ; the docu- 
ment which was to set four millions of human 
beings free ; the document which was to relieve the 
Constitution from the curse of slavery ; the docu- 
ment which was to make the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence for the first time in our history the vital 
force in the principles and in the policies of the 
United States ; the document which was to remove 
the stain which made us a by-word and reproach 
among all civilized people ; the document which 
carried out in letter and spirit the vow made so 
many years before when the fiat-boatman saw the 
girl sold in the shambles at New Orleans. A few 
suggestions were made, a few hesitating protests 
against the fierce determination of the President 
for publication, an earnest request for delay until 
a victory should come, and that most memorable of 
Cabinet meetings in the history of the United States 
adjourned, and as they Hied out this incomprehen- 



16 

sible President put the Proclamation of Emancipa- 
tion back in the drawer and resumed the reading of 
Artemus Ward. 

I remember as if it was yesterday an afternoon 
with Mr. Lincoln. I was but a boy, though Secre- 
tary of ~New York State. Horatio Seymour was 
the Democratic Governor, and the Legislature was 
Republican. The soldiers' vote was to be obtained. 
The Republican Legislature would not trust the 
Governor, and it devolved upon me the duty of 
collecting the soldiers' vote. Mr. Lincoln looked 
up as I pressed my way through the crowd in his 
reception room and said : " Well, Depew, what 
can I do for you ? " I said : ' ; Mr. President, I do 
not want anything ; I am in Washington on a 
mission from our State to get out from the armies 
our New York soldiers' vote, and I simply called 
to pay my respects." He said : " It is so rare that 
anyone comes here who wants nothing, please wait 
and I will get rid of these people in a few minutes." 
The room was soon emptied, the faithful " Jerry " 
was guarding the door, and on the lounge the tired 
President was rocking to and fro, holding his long 
knees in his arms and telling story after story to 
relieve his mind, and he said : " Depew, they say 
I tell a great many stories. I think I do. They 
say I lower the dignity of the Presidential office 
by these broad anecdotes. Possibly that is true. 
But I have found, in the course of a long ex- 
perience, that the plain people of the country take 
them as they are, and are more easily reached and 



17 

influenced and argued with through the medium of 
a humorous illustration than in any other way." 

While I was there Mr. John Gfanson, of Buffalo, 
was a member of Congress. His face and his head 
were hairless and polished like a billiard ball. He 
was a Democrat, but supported the President. The 
conditions of the army were very blue in the East 
and in the West. Ganson came in one day and 
said : " Mr. President, I am risking my re-election 
in supporting your war measures. The campaign 
seems very unsatisfactory. Of course I will not 
give out anything you tell me. What is the situa- 
tion at the front?" Mr. Lincoln, in his searching 
and sad way, looked at him for a moment as if he 
was about to reveal the secret of the whole army, 
and then tumbled Ganson out of the recejjtion room 
by saying, ' w Ganson, how clean you shave." Lord 
Lyons, who was a bachelor, went up to announce 
the marriage of the Princess Alexandra. As is 
usual on such occasions, the Secretary of State had 
prepared a formal reply to the address of the Eng- 
lish Minister. Mr. Lincoln fumbled in his pockets, 
and, unable to find Mr. Seward's courtly response, 
grasped Lord Lyons cordially by the hand and said, 
" Lyons, go thou and do likewise." 

As I sat in his room that afternoon, it was not 
Congressmen who crowded about him, it was not 
Senators, but it was wives and mothers who wanted 
to get to the front, and whom the War Department 
would not permit to go where their loved ones lay 
wounded in the hospitals. It was wives and 



18 

mothers and fathers pleading for husbands and 
sons condemned to be shot. No petitioner for 
mercy ever left Lincoln with his petition not 
granted. I was dining one night with General 
Sherman, and, except Mr. Choate and myself, all 
the guests were commanders of armies in the war. 
They were all lamenting how Mr. Lincoln had im- 
paired discipline by pardoning the men who had 
been court-martialed and condemned to be shot, and 
the proceedings of the court-martial approved by 
them, and finally Slocum said, "Sherman, what 
did you do?" That stern old warrior answered 
grimly, " I shot them first." But with Mr. Lincoln 
it was impossible to approve a death warrant. To 
the father pleading for his son he gave a respite, 
and, when the father wanted something more, his 
answer was, " If your boy lives till that sentence is 
carried out, he will be so old that the world 
will think Methuselah was a baby in years when 
he died." On his first visit to General Grant's 
headquarters the driver of the mules was arguing 
with his team in that picturesque fashion which the 
army teamster thinks can be best understood by 
the mule. Mr. Lincoln's rebuke of the blasphemy, 
which he detested, was unique. "My friend," said 
he, "are you an Episcopalian?" "No, Mr. Presi- 
dent, I am a Methodist." "Oh!" said Mr. Lin- 
coln, "I thought you were an Episcopalian, be- 
cause my Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, some- 
times talks that way, and he is a warden in the 
Episcopal Church in Auburn." 



19 

It is significant of our time and of the questions 
interesting to us, as we celelebrate the birthday 
of this saviour of the Republic, this foremost of 
statesmen, this plainest and most honest of mortals, 
this most dignified, most humorous, most serious, 
most sad of men, this most gentle of human beings, 
this leader in his time, and of all time, of the Re- 
publican party, that his first speech was for a pro- 
tective tariff. He was first, last and all the time an 
American ; an American when Napoleon, invading 
Mexico, would have broken up the Union, an 
American when Great Britain would have inter- 
fered for the purpose of destroying the Republic — 
because, as Lord Salisbury said, we kept shop and 
were her rivals in business — an American in his 
earnest devotion to the Union and the Constitution, 
an American in his love of liberty, an American in 
his belief that within the borders of the United 
States should be manufactured all that the 
people of the United States might require for 
themselves. He loved the Union above all 
things. He was the representative of the cult 
which was started by Daniel Webster. The world 
little knows what it owes to that great brain. " The 
Union, one and inseparable, now and forever" was 
the inspiration of the schools. It created a mighty 
wave of unreasoning worship of the Union. Lin- 
coln absorbed it, Lincoln understood it. In his in- 
augural address — the first one— it was the Union ; 
in his inaugural address — the second one— it was 
the Union, in all his letters and speeches it was the 



20 

Union. It was the Union with slavery, or the 
Union without slavery, but always the Union of 
the States. 

We cannot pass by this celebration, Ave cannot 
relegate again to the books and the libraries 
this heroic and majestic figure without enforcing 
by his example and teachings the sentiment of 
the hour. There are always great crises coming 
periodically in the history of nations. It was the 
Revolutionary War which gave us our Republic. 
It was the debates with Hayne and with Douglas 
which gave us the love of union. It w 7 as the 
Civil War which ended slavery, and now it is the 
mighty contest of industrial forces, of economic 
principles, of the proper relations of the currency 
and the credit of the United States tc its trade 
and credit in other countries, upon which are 
builded our hopes or our fears. We have had a 
civil war in which no blood has been shed, but 
there have been more desolated homes, more closed 
industries, more sacrifices of property, more ruin 
and misery than was occasioned by the war from 
1861 to 1865. This has been caused by the same 
forces, springing largely from the same territory, 
coming largely from the same pale of intelligence 
and motives in different sections as that which 
precipitated the great struggle. The generation 
which followed the Civil War knew what the Dem- 
ocratic party in pow T er meant, and kept it in the 
minority for a quarter of a century. The world is 
fond of experiments, and experiments run in cycles. 



21 

What has been will be. So, after thirty years we 
have tried the Democratic party in power once 
more. We gave them the Presidency and Congress, 
and we have had repeated, industrially and finan- 
cially, the experiences of the Democratic party in 
power, as it was evidenced in their rule prior to 
1860. The Democratic party stands for nothing 
national. Its principles in the east are antagonistic 
to its principles in the west. Its ideas in the west 
are hostile to its ideas in the south, and its views on 
the Pacific coast have no relations to its principles 
or ideas or views anywhere else in the country. 

Mr. Lincoln might have lived and added to his 
greatness by a speedier settlement of the issues 
which arose out of the Civil War. Mr. Cleveland 
was President for four years without power, and 
had he never been re-elected, with a Democratic 
party on his hands, he might, with the halo which 
was thrown around him, have gone down to poster- 
ity as one of the great Presidents of the country. 
But Cleveland was re-elected and did have the 
Democratic party on his hands, and what might 
have been is not, and Cleveland is not regarded as 
one of the great Presidents of the country. 

We have won our victory. It is the victory of 
returning common sense, the victory of experience 
over hope. We are not yet out of the woods. The 
Republican party can only hold the country where 
it is and prevent further damage until it assumes 
the responsibilities of power. The difficulty with 
the democracy is not only of inexperience, but of in- 



22 

competence. The evolution of the student is first 
his devotion to phrases, and the more vague they 
mav be the more wise they seem, and from the 
phrase he comes to theory. The theory makes him 
a sceptic in religion and a mugwump in politics. 
Then he either settles down to the stern realities of 
life and successful solutions of his problems, or he 
becomes bankrupt in business and in faith. The 
Democratic party captured the country by the 
phrases " free raw materials," fc ' the tariff is a tax," 
u the markets of the world." We have lost the 
markets of the world, we have little left to tax, and 
our raw materials and manufactured articles and 
labor are all free, because there are so few pur- 
chasers or employers. We are governed by the 
party whicn gave us the Gorman tariff, which has 
left solvent only the business upon which Repub- 
lican protection is continued, the party which 
reversed the good old policy that you should pay 
your debts with money which you earned, and 
adopted the new one of paying them with borrowed 
money. Micawber is its financial authority. That 
party is suspending credit by the eyelids and busi- 
uess by the hair in the effort to solve the currency 
problem, which needs little better solution than to 
leave it alone. After thousands of years of hopeless 
experiments the Democratic leaders are still striving 
to square the circle and lift one's self over the stone 
wall by the straps of one's boots; they are still 
striving to pay debts without assets ; still striving 
to give money where none has been earned and dis- 



23 

tribute currency where there is no property to 
exchange for it ; still striving to give value to the 
air and to coin and mint theories, and they have re- 
duced the national credit so that the Government 
has to pay three and three-quarters per cent, inter- 
est where the citizen can borrow for three per cent. 
Against that the Republican party puts in prac- 
tice the maxims of "Poor Richard" and the 
principles which have made commercial nations 
prosperous and commercial peoples rich. This is 
not the time nor is there occasion for 
despair. The hand of the Republican engineer is 
on the throttle, and the train can no longer run 
away. The conductor can stop the momentum or 
side-track the cars, but the engineer will not let 
him derail them. The Republican House of Rep- 
resentatives is the living protest of the country 
against paralysis and despair, and it will hold the 
fort until in 1896 the relief comes and the country 
is saved. At the siege of Lucknow a handful of 
soldiers were defending their own lives and the lives 
of their wives and little ones against the hordes of 
Sepoys about them. The food was giving out, the 
hunger belt was drawn closer ; it seemed that the 
day of relief and salvation would never come. 
Suddenly the keen ears of the Scotch woman heard 
the distant bagpipes, and she shouted: "Dinna 
ye hear the slogan % It is Havelock and his High- 
landers." " Dinna ye hear the slogan V It came 
in the last election and gave the Republicans the 
House of Representatives. "Dinna ye hear the 



24 

slogan?" It came from the breaking of the solid 
South. "Dinna ye hear the slogan?" It came 
from Missouri, from Maryland, from Tennessee, 
from West Virginia. "Dinna ye hear the slo- 
gan?" It is the marching of the army which 
answered once, " We are coming, Father Abra- 
ham, three hundred thousand more," to the victory 
of 1896. Then the Republican Senate will respond 
to the Republican House, and the Republican 
House will respond to the Republican President, 
and the country will receive prosperity, happiness 
and peace. 



ADDRESS 

OF 

Hon. Cliauncey M. Depew, LLD., 



COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES OF THE UNI- 
VERSITY OF CHICAGO, AT THE 
AUDITORIUM, 

Monday Evening, April 1st, 1895. 



THE PRESENT, ITS OPPORTUNITIES 
AND PERILS. 

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : — 

In the career of a young man are several 
climacterics. They are well defined and in- 
tensely interesting if he has the advantages of a 
liberal education. Broadly stated they are his 
entering college, the day of his graduation, the 
career he adopts and his marriage. His gradu- 
ation day and the selection of his career come 
so close together that they may almost be ac- 
cepted as one. His university and the learned 
faculty have equipped and trained him for his 
life work. His reliance thereafter is upon him- 
self. He leaves college and enters the world 



26 

under poetic, even romantic conditions. His 
situation is like that of the knight in the ancient 
tournament whose valor and skill were witnessed 
by throngs of gallant gentlemen and beautiful 
ladies, and who, if successful, had the supreme 
happiness of crowning some one as the queen of 
love and beauty. As this modern knight of the 
college curriculum stands upon the commence- 
ment platform he is surrounded by admiring 
relatives, by happy and sympathetic friends and 
a joyous and applauding multitude. 

The entrance of a young man into the world 
is commonly described in the vocabulary of the 
literature of the battle-field, but that characteri- 
zation is wholly inadequate. Not only is it in- 
adequate, but it is untrue. The ambitious aspir- 
ant for the rewards and honors of life does not 
expect to win them by the defeat and destruc- 
tion of his competitors. Blood and treasure are 
not poured out in a successful career in litera- 
ture, the professions or business. It is an igno- 
ble and a mean view which relies upon the ruin 
of an opponent in order to secure his place. 
Success in life, with all its hot competitions, is 
rather a contest like some of the rames of 
Olympia and some of the athletic feats of our 
own times in which the swifter runner or the 



27 

more skillful oarsman may win the prize, but 
there are honors and cheers, there are places and 
rewards for those who fail in securing the su- 
preme positions. Of course we know of fortunes 
which have been made by the misfortunes of 
others and positions which have been won by 
the overthrow of others, but the man whose ac- 
cumulations, however great and glittering they 
may be, represent simply the ruin of tens, or 
hundreds, or thousands is nothing but a legal- 
ized brigand. It is the misfortune of our com- 
plex civilization that the law has not compre- 
hended and covered in its prohibitions and pen- 
alties all the opportunities of sinning against the 
persons and properties of a community. 

It is not the least of the glories of our period 
that a liberal education has become popular and 
the university the ambition of all the people. 
For nearly a thousand years the university was 
only for the select few. The plain people had 
no lot or part or interest or opportunity in its 
advantages. The medieval foundation which is 
the ancestor of the modern college was only for 
the benefit of a fraction of the population. 
Originally it was only for the church. It 
took centuries to embrace in a liberal education 
what are known as the professions. It is only 



28 

in our own time and in America that journalism 
has been recognized as one of the liberal profes- 
sions. There is nothing so conservative as the 
college. It follows last in the procession of 
progress ; it distrusts innovations and discredits 
theories. Its faculty by the very peculiarity of 
their existence learn to respect the traditions 
and the teachings of the past. They point to 
the long line of men, eminent in every depart- 
ment of human thought and activity, whom the 
colleges have created, and they naturally inquire 
most critically into the innovation which prom- 
ises to improve upon the Abelards and the 
Bacons, upon the Miltons and the hundreds of 
others who have illumined literature ; upon the 
innumerable line of statesmen and orators and 
the grand body of preachers and thinkers. The 
university in Europe has about it the medieval 
flavor. It is not a school of the people. It is 
still an institution for classes and not for the 
masses. Its training and its objects are for the 
professions, the sciences, literature and heredi- 
tary statesmanship. It is the American devel- 
opment which has^brought the college home to 
the people. Harvard and Yale, the parents of 
all the American colleges, were founded origi- 
nally simply J:o educate men for the pulpit. It 



29 

is a curious fact that for a hundred years after 
the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock 
there was not a lawyer in New England. In 
every community the minister was not only the 
pastor of his flock, the curator of souls and the 
administrator of the church, but he was also the 
authority in political matters and the judge in 
neighborhood disputes. His sacred office, his 
education and his superior training made him 
the leader of the people in all matters affecting 
their relations with each other or with their 
God. There are nearly four hundred colleges 
in the United States to-day and their number 
evidences the aspirations of the farm and the 
workshop for a higher education for their boys 
and their girls. This rapid evolution of the uni- 
versity toward popular ideas and popular bases 
in our country has made acute the question 
whether our education should be specifically for 
the pursuit which the student has selected as his 
vocation, or whether upon ancient and tried 
lines it should develop him first by discipline, 
by training, and by teaching to the full growth 
and command of all his faculties, and then let 
him select his pursuit. 

I acknowledge the position and the usefulness 
of the business college, the manual training 



30 

school, the technological institute, the scientific 
schools and the schools of mines, medicine, law 
and theology. They are of infinite importance 
to the youth who has not the money, the time, 
or the opportunity to secure a liberal education. 
They are of equal benefit to the college gradu- 
ate who has had a liberal education in training 
him for his selected pursuit. But the theorists, 
or rather the practical men who are the archi- 
tects of their own fortunes, and who are pro- 
claiming on every occasion that a liberal educa- 
tion is a waste of time for a business man, and 
that the boy who starts early and is trained 
only for his one pursuit is destined for a larger 
success, are doing infinite harm to the ambitious 
youth of this country. 

It has been my lot in the peculiar position 
which I have occupied for over a quarter of a 
century of counsel and adviser for a great cor- 
poration and its creators, and of the many suc- 
cessful men in business who have surrounded 
them, to know how men who had been denied 
in their youth the opportunities for education 
feel when they are possessed of fortunes and 
the world seems at their feet. Then they pain- 
fully recognize their limitations ; then they 
know their weakness ; then they understand that 



31 

there are things which money cannot buy, and 
that there are gratifications and triumphs which 
no fortune can secure. The one lament of all 
those men has been " Oh, if I had been educated ! 
I would sacrifice all that I have to attain 
the opportunities of the college ; to be able to 
sustain not only conversation and discussion 
with the educated men with whom I come in 
contact, but competent also to enjoy what I see 
is a delight to them beyond anything which I 
know." 

The college, in its four years of dicipline, 
training, teaching and development makes the 
boy the man. His Latin and his Greek, his 
rhetoric and his logic, his science and his phil- 
osophy, his mathematics and his history have 
little or nothing to do with law or medicine or 
theology, and still less to do with manufacturing, 
or mining, or storekeeping, or stocks, or grain 
or provisions. But they have given to the youth 
when he has graduated, the command of that 
superb intelligence with which God has endowed 
him, by which for the purpose of a living or 
a fortune, he grasps his profession or his 
business and speedily overtakes the boy who, 
abandoning college opportunities, gave his nar- 
row life to the narrowing pursuit of the one 



32 

thing by which he expected to earn a living. The 
college-bred man has an equal opportunity for 
bread and butter, but beyond that he becomes a 
citizen of commanding influence and a leader 
in every community where he settles. Within 
his home, however humble it may be and how- 
ever limited his income to support it, he has 
enjoyment among his books and in the grasp 
and discussion of the questions of the hour, 
which are denied to the man who has not drunk 
at or who refused to o-o to the fountain of 
knowledge and the well-spring of inspiration 
which flows only in the college or the university. 
The best proof of the value of a college 
education in all the pursuits of life is to be 
found in the eminent success of those who have 
enjoyed it in the higher walks of the profes- 
sions, of statesmanship and even in business. 
As de Tocqueville pointed out and as Bryce has 
discovered, ours' is a lawyers' government. The 
vast majority of our Presidents, our Cabinet 
Ministers, of the members of our House of Rep- 
resentatives and of the Senate have been law- 
yers. The reason has not been because the 
lawyers are better fitted to make laws or to 
legislate than the farmer or the business man, 
but because the lawyers have been better trained 



33 

from having been in the past almost universally 
educated at the college. The legislation of the 
Parliament of Great Britain during the past fifty 
years has been as liberal and as advanced as 
that of any government in the world. It has 
been a constant succession of measures for the 
emancipation of the sufferage, the emancipation 
of trade, and the emancipation, upon philan- 
thropic lines, from the penal laws which repre- 
sented the barbarism of the Middle Ages. 
Very few of the members of Parliament 
have been lawyers, but ninety one-hundreths 
of the members were graduates of the great 
universities of Great Britain, and there they 
secured that university training which gave 
to them that broadness of understanding, 
that fullness of grasp, that touch with the 
questions of the hour, that knowledge of the 
present and of the past, and insight into the 
future which made them the statesmen of the 
British Empire. 

The world which our' young man enters to- 
day is a very different one from that which his 
father or his grandfather or his ancestor of a 
hundred years ago knew anything about. Fifty 
years ago he would have graduated at a denom- 
inational college and fallen into the church of 



34 

his fathers and of his faculty. Fifty years ago 
he would have dropped into the party to which 
his father belonged. He would have accepted 
his religious creed from the village pastor and 
his political principles from the national platform 
of his father's party. But to-day he graduates 
at a college where the denominational line is loose- 
lv drawn, and finds that the members of his fam- 
ily have drifted into all churches and are profess- 
ing all creeds, and he must select for himself the 
church in which he shall find his home, and the 
doctrines upon which he shall base his faith. 
He discovers that the ties of party have been 
loosened by false leaders or incompetent 
ones, and by the failure of party organizations 
to meet the exigencies of the country and the 
demands of the tremendous development of the 
times. Those who should be his advisers say to 
him, " Son, judge for thyself and for thy country." 
Thus at the very threshold he requires an equip- 
ment which his father did not need for his du 
ties as a citizen or for the foundations of his 
faith and principles. He starts out at the close 
of this marvelous nineteenth century to be told 
from the pulpit and the platform and by the 
press, and to see from his own observations 
that there are revolutionary conditions in the 



35 

political, the financial and the industrial world 
which threaten the stability of the state, the po- 
sition of the church, the foundations of society 
and the safety of property. But while precept 
and prophesy are of disaster he should not de- 
spair. Every young man should be an optimist. 
Every young man should believe that to-morrow 
will be better than to-day and look forward with 
unfaltering hope for the morrow, while doing 
his full duty for to-day. 

That the problems are difficult, and the situa- 
tion acute, we all admit. But it is the province 
of education to solve problems and remove acute 
conditions. Our period is the paradox of civil- 
ization. Heretofore our course has been a mat- 
ter of easy interpretation and plain sailing by 
the navigation books of the past. But we stand 
five years from the twentieth century facing 
conditions which are almost as novel as if a vast 
convulsion had hurled us through space and we 
found ourselves sitting beside one of the canals 
of Mars. 

Steam and electricity have made the centu- 
ries of the Christian era down to ours 
count for nothing. They have brought 
about a unity of production and markets 
which upset all the calculations and all 



36 

the principles of action of the past. They 
have united the world in an instantaneous 
communication which has overthrown the limi- 
tations which formerly were controlled by time 
and distance or could be fixed by legislation. 
The prices of cotton on the Ganges or the Ama- 
zon, of wheat on the plateaus of the Himalayas 
or in the delta of the Nile, or in the Argentines, 
of this morning, with all the factors of currency 
of climate and wages which control the cost of 
their production, are instantly reflected at noon 
at Liverpool, at New Orleans, at Savannah, at 
Mobile, at Chicago and at New York. They 
send a thrill or a chill through the plantations 
of the South and the farm-houses of the West. 
The farmers of Europe and America are justly 
complaining of their conditions. The rural popu- 
lations are rushing to the cities and infinitely in- 
creasing the difficulties of municipal government. 
Capitalists are striving to form combinations 
whichjshall float with the tide or stem it, and labor 
organizations with limited success are endeavor- 
ing to create a situation which they believe will 
be best for themselves. The tremenduous pro- 
gress of the last fifty years, the revolutions 
which have been worked by steam, electricity 
and invention, the correlation of forces working 



37 



on one side of the globe and producing instan- 
taneous effects upon the other, have so changed 
the relations of peoples and industries that 
the world has not yet adjusted itself to them. 
The reliance of the present and future must be 
upon education, so that supreme intelligence may 
brincr order out of the chaos produced by this 
nineteenth century earthquake of opportunities 
and powers. 

There have always been crises in the world. 
They have been the efforts and aspirations of 
mankind for something better and higher, and 
have ultimately culminated in some tremendous 
movement for liberty. These revolutions have 
been attended by infinite suffering, the slaughter 
of millions and the devastation of provinces and 
kingdoms. The crusades lifted Europe out of 
the slavery of feudalism, the French Revolution 
broke the bonds of caste. Napoleon was the 
leader and wonder worker, though selfishly so, of 
modern universal suffrage and parliamentary 
o-overnment. The aspiration of all the centuries 
has been for liberty and more liberty. The expec- 
tation has been, that when liberty was gained 
there would be universal happiness and peace. 
The English speaking peoples have secured 
liberty in its largest and fullest sense; that 



38 

liberty where the people are their own govern- 
ors, legislators and masters. The paradox of 
it all is that with the liberty which we all hold 
as our greatest blessing has come a discontent 
greater than the world has ever known. The 
socialist movement in Germany grows from a 
hundred thousand votes ten years ago to some 
millions in 1894. The Republican elements in 
France become more radical and threatening 
month by month. The agrarian and labor 
troubles of Great Britain are beyond any ability 
of her statesman to overcome except by make- 
shifts from day to day. There was an anarchist 
riot in Chicago, when only the disciplined valor 
of a small corps of policemen saved the great 
city from the horrors of pillage and the sack. 
A single man created an organization of railway 
employees in a few months so strong that under 
his order twenty millions of people were paralyzed 
in their industries, and their movements, and all 
the elements which constitute the support of com- 
munities temporarily suspended. So potential 
was this uprising that two governors surrendered 
and the mayor of one of our Western Metropolis 
took his orders from the leader of the revolt. 
Industrial and commercial losses of incalculable 
extent were averted only by the strong arm of 
the Federal Government. 



39 

A Congress which has just adjourned nominally 
represented several parties, but recognized allegi- 
ance to none, and its ignorance and incom- 
petence were the wonder of the world and the 
amazement of the country. Its idiocy nearly 
wrecked the credit and business of the country. 
It could formulate no policy, nor devise any 
scheme of relief. Each of its little groups had its 
pet theories and plans. Its faults and failures were 
due to ignorance. There was not enough of 
educated intelligence to concentrate upon meas- 
ures which could start once more the wheels 
of industry and give profitable employment on 
the farms, and in the factories, the mines and the 
railroads. The times are ripe for ignorant dema- 
gogues and educated patriots, and our colleges 
are the recruiting stations for the patriots. All 
these are not revolutions. They are symptoms ; 
symptoms of conditions which must be grasped, 
understood, met and solved. We need fear 
no revolution, because revolution only comes, 
as it has in the past, when there is an under and 
oppressed class seeking to break the crust of 
caste or privilege. We have no caste or priv- 
ilege. The people who are discontented are 
the governors and rulers and must solve their 
own problems. They can elect their own Con- 



40 

gresses and presidents. They cannot revolt 
against themselves nor cut their own throats, 
Sooner or later and in some way or other they 
will solve their problems, but it will be by and 
through the law. It will be by destructive or 
constructive methods. 

The inquiry is natural, " With all the pros- 
perity and progress of the world, why this dis- 
content?" The rapidity of invention and the 
opportunities afforded by electricity and steam 
have destroyed in the last twenty-five years 
sixty per cent, of the capital of the world and 
thrown forty per cent, of its labor out of employ- 
ment. The triple expansion engine, the inven- 
tion of a new motor, the reduplication of forces 
by a new application of machinery makes use- 
less all the old ones. It does more, it compels 
the skilled artisan, in the loss of the tool by which 
he earned his living, and which is no longer of 
any use, to fall back into the vast mass of com- 
mon laborers. At the same time these very 
forces which have thus destroyed the majority 
of values and thrown out of employment so 
many people, have created new conditions which 
have added beyond the power of calculation to 
the wealth of the world and the opportunities 
of its people for living, comfort and happiness. 



41 

But to enjoy its opportunities, its comfort and 
its happiness a better education becomes neces- 
sary. 

Another of the Paradoxes of our quarter of 
a century is that every artisan and mechanic 
and the laborer in every department to-day, with 
shorter hours of labor, receives twenty-five per 
cent, and in many cases fifty percent more than 
he did thirty years ago. While he receives 
thus one third more than he did thirty years 
ago, his dollar will buy in clothes and food 
twice as much as it would thirty years ago. 
One would think that the laborer ought to be 
supremely happy when he compares the past 
with the present, and that beyond his living he 
ought to be laying up in the savings bank the 
fund which would speedily make him a capita- 
list. And yet he feels a discontent which his 
father thirty years ago with one-third the wages 
and his dollar buying only half as much, never 
knew. This all comes of education. 

Education has made possible the marvelous 
growth of our country, and the wonderful op- 
portunity it affords for employment and fortunes, 
but it has lifted our people out of the methods 
and habits of the past, and we can no longer 
live as our fathers did. 



42 

The common school and the high school, with 
their superior advantages, have cultivated us so 
that the refinements of life make broader and 
more intelligent men and brighter, more beauti- 
ful and more laro-e souled women. It lifts them 
above the plane of the European peasant. 
While education and liberty have made Ameri- 
cans a phenomenal people, they have also, in a 
measure, raised the standards of living and its 
demands in the older countries of Europe. The 
Indian laborer can live under a thatch in a 
single room with breech clout for clothes and a 
pan of rice for his food. But the American 
mechanic wants his home with its several rooms. 
He has learned, and his children have learned, 
the value of works of art. They have all 
become familiar with the better food and che 
better clothinp- and the better life which con- 
stitute not luxury but comfort and which makes 
up and ought to make up the citizens of our 
Republic. 

Masterful men of oreat foresight and courage 
have seized upon the American opportunity to 
accumulate vast fortunes. The masses who 
have not been equally fortunate look upon them 
and say " we have not an equal share in these 
opportunities." This is not the place nor have I 



43 

time to even hint at the solution of these diffi- 
culties, or the solving of these problems. That 
the genius exists among - us to meet them if need 
be by legislation, if need be by other processes 
no man in his senses can doubt. We require 
for our time more education, more college 
students, and more college opportunities. 
Every young man who goes out from these 
foundations into the world goes out as a mis- 
sionary of light and knowledge. He will stand 
in the community where he will settle for an 
intelligent, broad and patriotic appreciation of 
the situation of the country and in his neighbor- 
hood. The graduates of the four hundred Uni- 
versities of the country are the lieutenants and 
the captains, the colonels the brigadier generals 
and the major generals of that army of Ameri- 
can progress to which we all belong. We are 
fighting the battles not only of to-day but for 
all times ; we are developing this country not 
only for ourselves but also for posterity. We 
have overcome slavery, we have extirpated 
polygamy and our only remaining enemy is ig- 
norance. 

The best use to which wealth can be applied 
is to assist these great universities which are 
thus educating the youth of our land. 



This institution which owes its existence to 
the beneficence of Rockefeller is in itself a monu- 
ment of the proper use of wealth accumulated 
by a man of genius. So is Cornell, so is 
Vanderbilt, and so are the older colleges, as 
they have received the benefactions of generous, 
appreciative and patriotic wealth. But in view 
of the dangers which are about us and of the 
difficulties which are before us we cannot 
rely alone upon what the rich may do or what 
philanthropy, or generosity or wisdom may sug- 
gest. The State has already done well in the 
common school ; it has done better in the high 
school, and better still in the final opportunity 
which it gives in many cases for a liberal educa- 
tion. 

It would be a long step forward in populariz- 
ing hiofher education if the Government should 
establish at Washington a great National Uni- 
versity. As at Oxford or at Cambridge there 
are historic colleges with foundations running 
back for hundreds of years, and each having its 
own traditions, but all part of the University, 
so in every state there would be colleges, 
each one of them having its own merits and 
traditions and all of them belonging to the 
Grand University which will represent the cul- 
ture of the new world, the University of the 
United States. 



ADDRESS 



OF 



Hon. Chaimcey M. Depew, LL. D., 

At His Birthday Dinner Tendered 
Him by 

The Montauk Club, of Brooklyn, 

Saturday Evening, April 20th, 1895. 



Marvellous in its fullness and enthusiasm was the 
spirit of good-fellowship which surrounded Chaun- 
cey M. Depew at his sixty-first birthday dinner at 
the Montauk Club, in Brooklyn, last night. It was 
a memorable night to every clubman present, and 
Mr. Depew' s speech was a triumph, his voice was 
strong and resonant, and his words fell on willing- 
ears. It was 10 o'clock before dinner was over. At 
every plate was a big peach, and Mr. Depew smiled 
as he saw them. Before President Charles A. 
Moore, of the club, introduced Stephen A. Gris- 
wold, who in turn introduced Mr. Depew, six 
"brownies " bearing a peach-tree well loaded with 
fruit came in and deposited it in front of Mr. 
Depew. 



46 

Mr. Depew, in responding to an address of wel- 
come by ex-Senator Griswold, spoke as follows : 

Mr. President and Gentlemen : On the 23d of 
April Shakespeare, St. George and myself were 
born, and I am the only survivor. It is hardly 
a case of the survival of the fittest. This 
annual compliment which you pay me is highly ap- 
preciated and valued. There is always somewhere, 
however, either a Hy or the remains of one in the 
purest amber. In my case it is the necessity on 
these recurring anniversaries to make a speech to 
substantially the same three or four hundred gen- 
tlemen who honor me, when the only subject before 
the house is the person whose birthday is cele- 
brated. As he is forbidden by every rule to talk of 
himself, how shall he meet this annual obligation ? 
He is in serious danger of having the guests cry 
out, as one of them did at a hotel where I was 
recently in the South, who, after the tenth day, as 
the evening banquet closed, remarked in a loud 
voice (I do not know that I get his chapter and 
verse correctly), " Hebrews xiii, 2." The indignant 
landlady after awhile said to him : " Sir, some of 
the best families which I have in my hotel are Jews, 
and they are hurt at this reference to them." He 
replied : " Madam, I did not refer to them. It was 
simply a tribute to your daily dinner which I in- 
tended to convey by quoting a verse which reads, 
' The same yesterday, to-day and forever.' " 
There is represented here every profession and 



47 

business of our American life. The clergyman, the 
lawyer, the doctor, the man of affairs and the man 
of literature sit to-night within the hospitable walls 
of this most hospitable of clnbs. The year since 
we last met has been so significant of events of mo- 
ment to the well-being of the State and society that 
they impress the lesson of progress and cheer the 
heart of the optimist by the evidences of continued 
improvement in the world. It has been particularly 
a year of revolt, of independence and of the results 
of beneficent revolution. Our platform in the Mon- 
tauk is as broad as the universe and as liberal as 
truth. 

After one serious break which broke the breakers, 
our discussions are free. It is understood that we 
are of all creeds and faiths in religion and politics. 
It is understood that we are here not as Repub- 
licans, nor as Democrats, nor as Prohibitionists, nor 
as Mugwumps, nor as Independents. We are here 
under the genial banner of good fellowship, to say 
what we please, so long as it is uttered with charity 
toward all and with malice toward none. We start 
with the maxim that no party has a monopoly of 
virtue and no party a corner on vice. It is the 
party in power out of which virtue oozes and which 
gradually accumulates vice. Hence we have the con- 
ditions which have led to the phenomenal overturn- 
ing since last we were here. When Kings County 
changes 50,000 votes, when a Republican Mayor 
of New York, by the changing of 70,000 votes one 



48 

way to 40,000 the other, is elected, when for the 
first time in ten years a Republican Governor and 
a Republican Legislature get into power by 
150,000 majority, it is not a party victory. It is 
because the good men of the majority, finding it 
impossible to purify municipal or State government 
within the organization, join the minority party to 
teach their rulers, organizers and leaders a drastic 
lesson. 

It is the plain teachings of such events that 
the lucky recipients of this combination of party 
fidelity and party disgust have it in their power to 
hold a sufficient number of the independent and 
thoughtful elements which came to them, to con- 
tinue for a period the power in their own hands, or 
else they can so use their opportunities for personal, 
or selfish, or purely party purposes as not only 
to drive away the men who had joined them 
temporarily, but a large body of their own inde- 
pendent following. In this way it is quite possible, 
if we may make such a metaphor, for a party to 
experience within a twelvemonth alternations from 
zenith to zero. 

The despair of the publicist and the sociologist 
has been the government of cities. The inrushing 
from the country and from abroad of desirable and 
undesirable peoples and the rapidity of settlement, 
making impossible the processes of assimilation, 
have made the municipal problem the despair of 
the statesman. But the last twelvemonth has 



49 

solved that problem — solved it on the side of liber- 
ty, and American liberty. It has demonstrated 
that the vox popull is the vox Dei, providing the 
voice of the people can find some medium through 
which it can be heard. 

How shall the voice be registered in legislation % 
When a committee of a hundred or a committee 
of seventy of the best citizens that all parties may 
have, who have the confidence of their fellow-citi- 
zens, present a programme, and that programme is 
adopted by the public vote, it carries with it two 
instructions — one, that this committee, whose pro- 
gramme was accepted, and the officers who were 
elected are the chosen representatives of the people, 
upon whom the people have put the responsibility, 
and in whom the people repose the confidence to 
frame the legislation which shall do away with the 
evils under which they have suffered and bring to 
them the reforms and good government for which 
they have fought and voted. 

Any declaration by statesmen, however wise, 
however experienced, however conscientious, from 
distant communities, that these committees and 
the officers elected on the wave of reform 
are novices in politics, that they do not know 
what the people want, that they do not un- 
derstand the needs of great populations, that their 
bills are foolish and their measures idiotic, is full 
of danger to the party organization, of which these 
gentlemen are the leaders, and its success in the 



50 

future. It may be that the measures are idiotic ; 
it may be that they are not wise, but the peo- 
ple whose representatives have framed them, as 
soon as they are defeated, will believe that they 
are the wisest measures ever devised by man, and 
the oftener they are defeated the more they will in- 
sist upon having them, or punish the party which 
defeated them. 

An event has occurred during the year, little 
noted, and yet of the greatest interest. I arrived in 
Chicago a few weeks ago to find candidates lost 
sight of in the popular discussion of a principle. 
The cabman who drove me around, the porter who 
carried my bag, the waiter who stood behind my 
chair in the hotel, the clerk who handed me the 
book in which to register my name, the ticket- 
agent in the railway depot, and the conductor on 
the horsecar, the clerk in the big drygoods store, 
and the elevator boy who carried us to the infinite 
heights of the Chicago building, all wanted to know 
what I thought of Civil Service Reform. The 
Legislature had passed a bill submitting to the 
people whether their offices should all be put upon 
Civil Service principles or should be the patronage 
of party leaders as theretofore. The result of this 
discussion in that most polyglot and cosmopolitan 
of Western cities was a majority of 50,000 for 
Civil Service. I remember when reformers with 
so-called fads, like the late George William 
Curtis, suggested Civil Service twenty years 
ago, how it was scouted by all parties. 



51 

We all of us who were active in politics believed 
that parties could not be run except by patronage, 
and we all of us— and I as readily as the rest— de- 
clared that without patronage a party leader could 
not hold his place nor a party retain its power. It 
was for the patronage with which to control the 
organization that Weed and Greeley split their 
party in two ; it was for the same high purpose 
that Conkling, on the one side, and all the leaders 
against him on the other, kept us in an internecine 
war ; it was for the same lofty object that the State 
machine, headed by Daniel Manning, and the city 
machine, headed by John Kelly, disrupted the 
Democratic party ; and patronage, with its sup- 
posed power and influence, has those eminent 
knights, armed cap-a-pie, with lance at rest, at 
either end of the lists, waiting for the signal to 
charge, Grover Cleveland and David Bennett Hill. 
And yet the people of Chicago, defying the poli- 
ticians, have taught them that government can get 
along without patronage. Civil Service applied to 
cities solves the question of municipal machines 
and municipal bossism. To that must be added the 
separation of city elections from the State and 
general elections. So a man can vote against a thief 
or an incompetent man in his own party for mayor 
or sheriff without destroying the tariff or passing 
the bill for the free coinage of silver. 

The processes for political power are simple. A 
few masterful men, whose business is iiolitics, and 



52 

who believe that the end justifies the means, get 
control of the machinery of the dominant party in 
the municipality. They elect their mayor and their 
board of aldermen, which secures for them the 
public works, the docks, water, gas and 
electricity, and that gives them the patronage. 
Then they appoint the judges of the police courts 
and the civil justices, and that gives them infinite 
power over the liberty and property of the citizen. 
Then they elect their members of the legislature, 
and that prevents the governing body from inter 
fering with them. And then they intimidate the 
higher courts, so that no complaints will be enter- 
tained. This accomplished, the great city is abso- 
lutely in the hands of a feudal baron, with his 
feudatories around him, intrenched in the City 
Hall. The city treasury supports from ten to twenty 
thousand retainers who are dependent absolutely 
upon the barony for their subsistence. Through 
them the baron holds the primaries, controls the 
organization, overawes inspectors, manages the 
count, owns the court and carries the legislature 
in his pocket. Then we have this amazing condi- 
tion, that the processes of liberty are capable of 
greater tyranny than the autocratic will of the 
despot. Despotism is tempered by the opportuni- 
ties of assassinating the tyrant. Against a semi- 
republican and semi-oligarchical government like 
that of France there can be revolution, but against 
a municipal tyranny owning the polls, controlling 



53 

the courts, managing the finances and masters of 
the party organization, frequent elections pre- 
vent revolt, and there is nobody to assassinate. 
I may be criticised for saying that the processes 
of liberty can be made more tyrannical than the 
edicts of a Czar, but you all remember in the mar- 
vellous revelations of the Lexow Committee that 
widow whose friends contributed a few hundred 
dollars for her to have a cigar store with which to 
support herself and her four children. She kept 
house in one room and sold her cigars in the other ; 
she sent her children to the public school, and she 
was doing everything which a good, virtuous, 
masterful, motherly woman could do to bring a 
family up respectably and keep out of the poor- 
house. The ward policeman wanted the contribution 
which she could not pay. Refusing, she was 
hauled to the police station, taken before the police 
judge, and sent to the penitentiary for six months, 
and when, on her release, she returned to her home 
she found her little stock of guods had been 
divided among the ministers of the law and her 
children had disappeared. It only required a 
policeman, a captain and a police justice to make 
possible an outrage which could not be per- 
petrated in any other country or in any other 
city in this wide world. Now civil service 
in municipal affairs makes this sort of crime 
impossible. Masterful men will always be leaders. 
They will always have a following, they will always 



54 

be dominant in the control of party organizations, 
but under civil service there will be no thousands 
or tens of thousands of retainers supported out of 
the city treasury to defeat the taxpayers who pay 
them. These officers will be relieved from party 
pledges and party control, and the leaders must 
appeal to the people. There will always be leaders, 
and so X say, "All hail the leader who, like Andrew 
Jackson, or Henry Clay, or James G. Blaine, or 
William E. Gladstone, the people can follow." 

And now, gentlemen, the year having proved so 
eventful, I have been struck with the questions 
which are brought to me by the interviewer. I 
have found that if you wish to know what the 
people are talking about it is first developed by 
the man with the pad and pencil who drops into 
your house or office and wants your opinion on it. 
Two questions seem to have been started sud- 
denly, and each assumed at once world-wide im- 
portance. The first, from the hitherto unknown 
Dr. Nordau, of Germany, is: "Is the world de- 
generating?" The second is Bismarck's wonder- 
ful remark in his eightieth-birthday speech, that 
he never received any happiness from his succes- 
ses. I beg leave to differ with both of these eminent 
men. The facts which I have just recited show 
that the world is not degenerating, and Bismarck, 
when he made the startling observation that suc- 
cess brought no happiness, ignored the fact that 
his success had brought to him on his eightieth 



55 

birthday the homage and devotion of the German 
peoples, not only in their own land, but wherever 
they might be all over the world ; that this hom- 
age was received for his success in establishing 
German unity, and for his success in illustrating 
the possibilities of German brains and German en- 
ergy and what they could accomplish, and that this 
tribute of love and affection and veneration, coming 
from all over the world, gave to him on his eightieth 
birthday more happiness than had been concentrated, 
in all the days and all the years of his past exist- 
ence. "Is the world degenerating V says the news- 
paper interrogator. Certainly it is not in the liberties 
which are being gained for the people, because they 
are increasing year by year. Certainly it is not in 
the education which is afforded by the Government, 
for that is enlarging and becoming better all the 
time. Certainly it is not in standards of morality. 
Twenty-five years ago Palmerston was Prime Minis- 
ter of England and Disraeli the leader of the opposi- 
tion. Palmerston at eighty had been detected in an 
intrigue of which the proofs were clear and positive. 
The party leaders went to Disraeli and said : "Let 
us drive him from office." Disraeli's answer was : 
" If you start that movement, I resign, because it 
will lead to his becoming so popular that he will 
remain permanently in power." Ten years after- 
ward the same thing drove Dilke from public 
life, and later did infinite injury to Parnell, 
and to-day there is no man in America or in Eng- 



56 

land, in public life, who could survive the clear 
proofs of a violation of the Seventh Command- 
ment. Ail these things, which are taken as 
evidences of degeneration, are simply the nine- 
teenth century cleaning house for its new ten- 
ant, the twentieth century. There are always 
about the old house rubbish, unused furniture, 
old rags and the remnants of tilth and disease. The 
good tenant does not leave these evidences for the 
new one to discover the family weaknesses and 
criticise the family habits. The nineteenth century 
is a good tenant and it is sweeping out fads and 
humbugs of every nature and description. It is 
gathering them up and putting them in shape, either 
to bury or burn them, to carry them away, or to 
put them in the apartment which is reserved for 
things which are to be brought out hereafter. 

We have labor troubles, and yet with the various 
solutions of paternalism in government, of arbitra- 
tion, of co-operation and educational advantages 
bringing capital and labor nearer together, the nine- 
teenth century bids fair to solve the problem be- 
fore the twentieth century comes in. We have had 
our stage flooded with plays which made the heroine 
anything but what she ought to be, until the play- 
wright believed that without such a heroine the 
play was impossible, and we have simply brought 
her out in the closing years of the century to ex- 
pose her hideousness in order that the twentieth 
might not find her in the house. We have had 



57 

aestheticism and have cultivated it, and praised it, 
and honored it, and finally, when we found it was 
filth covered with flowers, we have buried it in a 
felon's cell with Oscar Wilde. We have had 
our literature, which the German scientist 
especially deprecates, where the good eld novel 
which amused and inspired us and brought us in 
contact with humanity and with nature for the 
betterment of our mind and soul was succeeded by 
the modern experiment. The new novel came 
from Zola and Tolstoi and Ibsen and their like. 
It came to preach doctrines. The new novel 
bored us with sermons, and sent us to bed 
with the headache, because of problems and possi- 
bilities which threatened the disruption of society, 
of the family and of all in which we had invested 
our hearts, our hopes and our future. The closing 
hours of the nineteenth century are getting rid of 
those novels by rushing frantically, with out- 
stretched arms and mouths wide open, to human 
nature, humble, fascinating, plain, common, human 
nature, in Trilby. 

The transparent lesson to us of the closing hours 
of the nineteenth century is that while the century 
dies, we should live as long as we can. We can 
only live by getting out of life all there is in it. 
What is happiness, anyway ? While I do not dis- 
credit the future world, but, on the contrary, be- 
lieve in it, according to the doctrines of the Church 
which I attend, yet we do not personally know, 



58 

either from those who have come from the other 
world, or from revelations received from there, pre- 
cisely what is the happiness of the next world. 
Our problem is not so much to long for that as to 
find our happiness here. Where is it ? It is in a 
healthy mind, a healthy soul and a healthy body, 
and. even if your body is not healthy, you can keep 
the other two in fair condition. 

The secrets of happiness and. longevity, in my 
judgment, are first, cherish and cultivate cheerful, 
hopeful and buoyant spirits. If you haven't them, 
create them. Enjoy things as they are. The rag- 
gedest person I ever saw was a Turkish peasant 
standing in the field, clothed in bits of old carpet. 
But the combination of color made him a 
thing of beauty, if not a joy forever. Let us 
never lose our faith in human nature, no matter 
how often we are deceived. Do not let the decep- 
tions destroy confidence in the real, honest good- 
ness, generosity, humanity and friendship that ex- 
ist in the world. They are overwhelmingly in 
the majority. I have lost twenty-five per cent. 
of all I have ever made in loaning money and in- 
dorsing notes, and have incurred generally the 
enmity of those I have helped because I did not 
keep it up. But every once in a while there was 
somebody who did return in such full measure the 
credit for the help that was rendered, that faith 
was kept alive, and the beauty and the goodness of 
our human nature were made evident. 



59 

I have appointed about one thousand men to office 
and employment which gave them support and 
the chance to climb to positions of greater responsi- 
bilit}' and trust if they had the inclination and 
ability. About nine out of every ten of them 
throw stones at me because I did not do better for 
them, and keep pushing them, and yet there are a 
hundred or so who, by the exercise of their own 
ability, their own grasp of the situation, have gone 
onto the accomplishment of such high ambitions and 
successes, and have appreciated in so many ways 
the help extended to them by helping others, that 
again my faith in human nature remains undimin- 
ished. And my last recipe for happiness is to keep 
in touch with the young. Join in their games, be 
a partner in the dance, romp the fastest and turn 
the quickest in the Virginia reel or the country 
dance, go up to the old college and sit down and 
light your pipe and sing college songs, take the 
children to the theatre and howl with them at the 
roaring farce, and laugh with them at the comedy 
and cry with them at the tragedy, be their confi- 
dant in their love affairs, and if they are not equal 
to it, write their love letters, and never stop writing- 
some for yourself. 

Thus, gentlemen, will the twentieth century, 
with its cleaner purposes, its higher endeavor and 
its limitless opportunities, welcome us older fellows 
as the youngest and most vigorous of those who 
are to solve its problems and make its record. 



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